Sponsored by the Tile Association

Tileflair has grown from a single branch business, established in 1972 and trading from a high street location, to the largest, privately owned wall and floor tile distributor in the South of England. The company operates a flagship store in Bristol plus nine other showrooms and two warehouses across the south of England.

Tileflair’s managing director is Matthew Johnson. He says: “Our focus is on service which is reflected in our slogan, ‘Create something beautiful’. We make sure we provide a welcoming environment in all our stores so customers are inspired by our room settings and looked after by our staff, who are helpful, knowledgeable and, most importantly, genuinely interested in what the customer wants.”

Matthew says that often his trade customers, the fixers, send their clients into the store to choose their tiles. He continues: “We also have to provide our trade customers with a service they can rely on. They need to trust us to get the right tiles to the right place at the right time. And this is where K8 software is really important. It enables us to provide that service.”

K8 was installed at Tileflair in 1998. Today there are 50 users and the system processes more than 300,000 transactions each year and holds nearly 13,000 product files. The initial need was for a system that could handle inter-branch trading and they could add branches to as the company grew. “Another reason we chose K8,” explains Matthew, “was because whatever you are doing on the system, you are always ready for a sale. You can keep the sales screen open and just flip back to it. Complete visibility of stock and the ability to search for products and add them to an order so quickly and easily were other key benefits. It’s also very easy and intuitive to use.”